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Authors: Elizabeth Hay

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BOOK: Small Change
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“Oh yes,” I said. “I did.”

What were we really doing, Milt and I, on that long ride home when we encouraged her to read? The book was in her lap. She opened it. “Why don’t you read out loud?” I said.

She looked at Milt. “You wouldn’t mind?”

“No,” he said, “I’d like to hear it.”

The book was one of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s, or as my daughter calls her, Lucy Mud. I put a pillow behind my head in the middle of the afternoon, but I didn’t sleep. I asked for the book and read several chapters beyond the point where she had stopped. The motion of the car made me dizzy and sick, and I stopped reading after an hour.

We encouraged her to read even though we found the book ridiculous. We told ourselves she was endearing and congratulated ourselves on our tolerance. I suppose that’s friendship of a sort. We were apparently so uncritical, and she so deep in her mood, that there was an air of trust between us. And perhaps, in that moment, the trust was real, and only afterwards did it come to seem false.

Last night I dreamt about them. Milt entered the dream first, his friendliness of the same old type – shy, arrogant, prickly, somewhat sexual. He spoke in the same old way,
which was very little, but with a small smile to show that he thought you were one of the few people worth his while. I stood still in the middle of the kitchen floor. Milt moved around. He was as pleasant as he knew how to be, but without any easiness – a laboured, brooding man. Then Lorna came in. She barely acknowledged me. She offered a greeting, but one so cool – so calculatedly cool – so free of any desire for reconciliation — that it drove the words out of my mouth.

Now here was the surprise. She had a baby. In the dream not only were they still together, but they had a baby. She carried him against her chest.

Because they aren’t together any more. Milt lives with a woman who bleaches her hair and wears striped nailpolish. Lorna has vanished from the lives of everyone who knew him.

In the dream he asked, “What happened to you and Lorna?” He asked the question and the air splintered – heat waves from a toaster – nothing major – nothing even all that painful. But how to explain that rapid and total deterioration, except to say that we must have expected and wanted it, Lorna as much as I. It had happened to us before and now we were exacting revenge for previous friendships gone wrong.

In September, before I left Toronto for good, Lorna and I got together. We sat in a basement café drinking Styrofoam cups of cinnamon tea. She drank her tea, then whittled down the cup until it resembled a crude lace collar. Those little fingers, which always buttoned her own collars so high, so tight, whittled down the cup until it didn’t have a neck. We
visited by rote. In the first moment, when I stepped into her office, a look of warmth rose on her face only to disappear in the face of something less from me. She turned her back and did several unnecessary things at another desk so that I would have to wait. Then we walked across the street to the café. She carried her satchel of work slung over both shoulders like a hump of misery, having taken up law, she said, because it was hard, and we found a table, one of those too-small tables, and sat down on hard white wrought-iron chairs.

She whittled away until nothing was left but the smell of cinnamon on her fingers. I asked about her clients, she answered briefly. I mentioned my travel plans, she made it clear they made no sense. I talked about a young lawyer who was doing extremely well, someone much younger than she was, and did my best to rub it in. And all the while that whittling, as though she were wringing my neck.

“I’m afraid the friendship is dying,” she said of someone she had known since college, her oldest friend.

“The friendship is over,” she said matter-of-factly, dryly, with a minimum of regret.

In Lucy Mud’s book about Jane true friends seem to grow out of the ground like flowers, their loyalty and friendliness functions of the landscape. Lorna and I picked berries on the hills and near the shore, picked them into baskets and made jam in the kitchen. I remember how happy she was, how nearly relaxed. Three years later (a year after I last saw her) I wrote to her. I had been reading a book which caused
me a moment of superficial and inconstant regret. In that moment I wrote to her. It wasn’t much of a letter and she didn’t write back.

The letter would have fallen through the mail slot onto the small carpet in the vestibule. Other pieces of mail would have spilled onto the floor, and seeing who the letter was from she probably picked it up last. She may have read it in the high-backed armchair next to the soft bubbling and peaceful lighting provided for the angel fish. She may have fingered her top button with little fingers, nails bitten to the quick. Her hair would have been wound around her head in the usual way, not a strand out of place. No wind would blow that house down.

I admired her for not writing back. She was flintier than I was, and I admired that. She was Churchill and I was Chamberlain. I admired her for seeing through me and for not giving me the easy resolution I was after. Sentimental people, I find, often have hides like steel, and she was my steely, sentimental reader.

Purge Me with Hyssop

S
ix weeks ago in early October, when golden sunlight and golden leaves were falling on a light covering of snow, I found a hummingbird’s nest the size of a small egg fashioned from bluish-green lichen: a jewel attached by the humming-bird’s spit to the slender branch of a beech tree. I touched the nest, wet from its smaller egg of snow, and marvelled at its shallowness. Hummingbird feathers are not feathers, my brother told me, but iridescent scales: a water-air fish-bird. Itself and not itself, and in the tiniest possible way.

The leaves, too, are and are not themselves. Green leaves are not green, they are green blocking gold. The green fades, the gold appears, it fades and platinum appears, the light tawniness of this dark-toned month. These various pigments are always there, inside the leaves. The temperature drops and the colour is released.

Today is November 23rd. I woke early and showered, then pulled back the curtain and stepped into cold air. Drying myself, I noticed a splotch of red the size of a nickel below my left nipple. I touched it. It was hot and smooth, and I was too disturbed to brush my hair.

The waiting room was full. I almost turned away. There were several children, several young people, and an old couple. The old woman was suffering from that peculiar depigmentation disease which her makeup did little to conceal. She wore a large amethyst ring and held a black patent leather purse in her beige lap. Her hands were lard-white and her neck mapped with white and brown patches where the pigments had gone awry. Her name was Leah and her slightly shorter husband was Melville. The nurse called their names.

I heard the name Leah and the old woman faded and a young woman appeared.

On my knees I go through old letters in a cardboard box. Dust, grit, old cheque stubs, old clippings, and only at the bottom what I’m looking for: a large manila envelope with
Leah’s Letters
scrawled across the front. I am surprised by its size, can’t believe all the letters inside are hers, but they are. In memory we wrote to each other for only a few years. The first year – our final year of high school and the year we met – there was no need to write. Then university, when I wrote to her more often than she wrote to me but she held up her end fairly well. Then the gradual decline until our letters
arrived at intervals of years rather than months, and like splats on the windshield.

When I think of her now I see a splash of light, then particular facets glinting off glasses and teeth. A heavy radiance and a brilliance. She was on stage addressing the school, a beaming, fleshy, eloquent presence: a star pupil.

And when I think of myself? Not beaming, but broad in the beam; shedding so much that anyone could trace my route through school by following the long blond hairs I left behind.

We were seventeen and I was new to the town she had lived in all her life. We were side by side – a bus trip to some track meet somewhere – and she was plying me with questions out of what appeared to be genuine interest.
Plying with questions
. Those are words she would have used: she described my mother once not as a good sewer but an accomplished seamstress. It occurred to me, gratified though I was by her interest, that she couldn’t be as popular as I had thought. There was room for me here, and I felt blessed.

That year was one of the happiest of my life. Overnight I became more capable. Exams were easier to write, teachers easier to talk to, students less intimidating. Leah and I directed a play together, and for the first time in my life I felt a surge of unshakeable confidence. The play was Thornton Wilder’s one-acter about a small family in a car: I remember the mother seeing a dog on the side of the road and saying, “What that dog needs is a good plate of leavin’s.” It was a tender play and it occupied us for more than a month.

And now I hear my name. Bethie. Not the nurse calling, but Leah, and years ago. She saw me first and spoke my
name before I recognized her. Her smile – that glorious smile that lit up a whole school – had changed to something slower and more tentative. Her hair was longer and touched with grey, her shoulders rounder. She had put on weight and she had never been thin. She took my black canvas shoulder bag to the car and we drove to her rented farmhouse in the country.

It was hot, mid-June, 1981. We were twenty-nine. Machines moved across the fields threshing hay, “Right on time,” she said, looking away because she knew how many small animals were under the blades.

Her husband was in the kitchen. A large man, heavy-set, soft-spoken, defensive, kind. He rose from the table and left us alone, but by then – suppertime – our conversation had petered out.

I go over her letters at midday, the heat coming on, the light coming in, my heart sore – this is the word that comes to mind – for the loss of my friend. I think about the legendary student who resisted her reputation for brilliance even while she exhausted herself upholding it: chewed her fingers raw, strained her eyes until she couldn’t see, wept when a missed bus meant a late assignment. Hour after hour she kept to the tightly drawn schedule in her small red notebook, and despised herself. She said she was more afraid of success than failure, and she was terrified of failure.

Christ must have been a relief. A great teacher and a generous marker.

She always felt I didn’t understand. Which is true. I didn’t understand and I resented her, not for discarding me
exactly but for sidelining me while she went off to God. In the end she became a Baptist minister’s wife.

I remember a few disloyalties. I can count them like beads. This is one, writing about her. The letter I sent when she got married is another. The times she left me behind for more desirable friends. The time she dismissed my future. We were in the dining room of her small house, we were still in high school, it was a sunny afternoon and she told me I would probably be a writer the way my mother was a painter: always trying but never great. I nodded because she was right, but I wished she hadn’t said it and so did she. “I can’t believe I said that,” when I reminded her years later.

One aspect of the letters astonishes me. My handwriting now is almost identical to hers in the beginning, as though an hourglass has turned and one feminine figure has drained into the other. Is it possible that we have come closer together in this way if no other?

I understand her choice of husband now much better than I did before. How drawn she must have been to a man for whom academic excellence didn’t matter. For various reasons he had done as poorly at school as she had done well, and no doubt they felt mutual relief at turning their backs on academic performance.

On the other hand, what did they talk about?

He said little over supper, ate quickly, rose from the table and went outside. Already she had admitted to me that she was unhappy, stricken by doubts about her marriage and
about God, yet entrenched in both. She must have been so tired of my levelheaded questions, my unspoken disappointment, my unreliable fealty. She stopped talking about her life and didn’t ask about mine.

I think she felt too much on view to see me as anything but an audience for her peculiarities. She was simultaneously on the surface of herself and hiding: so self-conscious that she was aware of every one of her words and gestures, and thought I must be similarly aware. She had been watched so long, viewed and noticed and remarked upon, picked out and set apart, that when she vanished there was no real place to go. “I have even more difficulty showing myself than in 1970,” she wrote to me before my visit. “I’m sure you will be disappointed.”

I was touched by that remark, yet angry. Who did she think I was? An examiner? Well, maybe so. Maybe she turned me into more of an examiner than I wanted to be.

I was aware – this is what hurt most – that she wanted and needed a different sort of friend, someone livelier and more entertaining, less intent and more openly fucked-up. I remember a walk over snowy fields when I joked about Peary and the Pole, but the joke went on too long and I didn’t have another.

BOOK: Small Change
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